feed my poor cat.” And yet what if the man from the park was keeping an eye on her building now?
“Where’s your place?”
“The Upper West Side.”
“I thought I’d drive home with you and make sure you got back okay. I’ll head to work from there.”
“Look, you don’t—”
“Stop. There’s no way I’m going to just let you go home alone—not after what happened last night.”
She felt relieved knowing he’d be with her.
“Thank you.”
“That’s just step number one. From there you need to call this nurse you mentioned—as soon as possible. But is there any chance she could be involved?”
Lake shook her head. “At this point I don’t feel sure of anything, but Maggie seems like a pretty guileless person.”
“Okay, then, explain to her what happened to you. Let her know how serious the situation is and that you need her help.”
“I’ll do my best to convince her.”
“Good. How long has she worked there?”
“About three years, I think. She’s the one Keaton had given his keys to so she could pick up his mail.”
“It’s not going to be easy to get her to betray her bosses,” Archer said. He tapped his lips lightly with his fist. “I wish we had some kind of proof to offer her—a way to legitimize your story.”
“I think I have something,” Lake said softly. “Not actual proof, but a strong indication that the clinic used Alexis’s embryos on someone else—and is doing it with other patients as well.”
He raised his chin, expectant.
“I think I know what the letters mean.”
“You’re kidding,” he said, astonished. “Tell me.”
“It seems so obvious now, but it wasn’t until I was lying in the dark last night and saw them in my mind that I figured it out. I think the first letters refer to hair color—BR for brown, BL for blond, R for red, and BK for black, maybe, though I never saw that one. The second set is for eye color—b for blue, br for brown again, g for green.”
Archer stared at her, incredulous.
“Geez. Because that way—”
“—they do the best job of matching. Keeping track of a couple’s coloring isn’t necessary for medical purposes, and even if it was, why be so cryptic about it? But if the clinic is stealing embryos and transferring them to other women, it would be important to have that information. You’d want to make sure that the baby had coloring similar to its parents. The first indication that a child might not be yours would be if the coloring were totally off. From what I know it’s fairly rare for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child—and many people just assume it’s not possible at all.”
“Right—blue eyes are a recessive trait.”
“If the coloring is really off, a couple might start asking questions. They might even get a DNA test for their peace of mind. And if there’s a discrepancy, they’re going to panic and demand an explanation.”
“But what happens when the kid gets older and his features don’t fit so well with his parents’?”
“If the coloring works, it may not seem like such a big deal. And by then there’s total attachment. Even if the parents have reason to be suspicious, they may not want to rock the boat.”
“Yeah, let sleeping dogs lie. And you just figured all this out last night, lying on my couch?”
Lake smiled. “I think my subconscious has been working on it for a while. When I spoke to Alexis, she made a point of saying that the baby she saw with Melanie Turnbull matched Melanie’s coloring perfectly. That comment has been playing in my brain somewhere ever since.”
Archer shook his head in disgust. “And all just to improve their success rates. Do you think all the doctors could be in on it?”
She thought of Steve and felt a pang of worry.
“I don’t know,” she said. She took a sip of coffee. “It’s possible that only a few people are involved and doing it without the others being aware. The nurses, for instance, could be totally in the dark.”
“Wouldn’t they be curious about the codes?”
“They might not notice them because they only appear on the basic information sheet that patients fill out in the beginning, not on the medical forms that get used later. Once a patient is under treatment, the focus would be on notations made about procedures, that sort of thing.”
“You need to persuade Maggie to look through a bunch of the files and see how many have these codes. Of course, if she’s in on it, this